Sunday’s Best Reviewed: Girls

On a surprisingly packed Easter Sunday, it’s a Marnie-centric episode of Girls that overwhelmingly wins the night — yes, that Marnie, the one whose popularity rankings are somewhere between Jeffrey Dahmer and Jar Jar Binks. She negotiates her new relationship boundaries on the subway and elsewhere in a show whose title “The Panic in Central Park,” recalls a classic early Al Pacino film. The Good Wife has a rare well-reviewed final season episode as the show “remembers it has other characters” as Karla Kumari Uphadyaya puts it. Meanwhile, over in undead-land, The Walking Dead stumbles slightly en route to the most promising of finales, as, if you haven’t heard, Negan should show up. In the “why is anyone reviewing this show” file, we’ve got Quantico which garners its usual so-so reviews.

In an episode that TV Fanatic‘s Caralynn Lippo professes “almost felt like a little short film,” Girls focuses on the fractious relationship between married couple, Desi and Marnie, and sends the latter on a side adventure with old flame Charlie Dattolo. Pilot Viruet at Vulture agrees on its mini-film nature (going with the lovely “vignette”) and adds it “functions better almost as a short vignette, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s a momentous episode in terms of Marnie’s growth as a character.” For AV Club‘s Joshua Alston, it “single-handedly revives my interest and investment in Marnie, a character I’d resigned myself to loathing somewhere in the back half of season two.”